Drops of rain streak across the car-window like bits of firework propagating through the night sky.
The destination: Cambridge, Massachusetts. The city that both elite colleges and average human beings call home.
The two centers of academia – Harvard and MIT – make up a cloistered world of scholars amidst the common residents of Massachusetts. The campuses are physically integrated into the city at a glance, but there is an invisible and undeniable line of demarcation that runs thick between the scholar and the simple Cambridgian. The two are living in worlds so separate that they could be at opposite ends of the earth. The proximity of college and city does not imply interaction between the two, just as correlation does not imply causation.
The world beyond the car-window is an odd mix of gray and green. The green ruddiness of spring foliage in the median stands out brightly against the dismal wet surroundings. Branches, sagging with their bounty of leaves, reach over the wall wistfully and bow to the moistened tar of road. The clouds hang in a similar manner, weighted by the bundles of earth-bound water they hold.
The rain continues to fall: possibly the only thing that touches both commonplace denizen and erudite scholar alike.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Fleeting Faces
It fit no earthly name.
The apparition Emily saw that day could not be described. It was something – just something. She couldn't capture it with the English language.
The English language... that fastidiously constructed edifice that tries and succeeds to contain all the vastness of life in its steely walls... failed to contain this being.
Was it even a “being”? No. The thing even evaded the basic categories of “life” and “lifeless” that have existed since the beginning of time. To try and assign “living”, or “dead”, or “inanimate” to it was as if to try and assign gender to a rock. The thing was wholly incompatible with such notions. It was neither living, nor dead, nor inanimate – it just existed.
Exist, it did. It wasn't a figment of her imagination. It stood out crisply against the backdrop of wall, not muddled with its surroundings – determinedly present.
And it was horrifying. But not horrifying because it eluded language, not because it was different from everything of Emily's world. Horrifying because its exterior was pockmarked with a peculiar black-and-white pattern. A pattern that repeated like a Julia fractal. A Julia fractal that spiraled to infinity.
The thing was bone-white. Gaping, black holes filled its center, which broke into repeating fragments as if it were some phantasmal projection of a kaleidoscope. It was a mosaic of nearly identical bits and pieces – each piece distorted a bit differently than the next, folding in on itself in horrifically beautiful symmetry.
The gaping holes – with their disorienting, echoing repetition – could swallow up the sanity of any observer.
But there wasn't time to get lost in its pattern. In a second, the thing had vanished – and Emily was staring down the blankness of the wall.
She shook the image out of her head. It was surely just a trick of the eye, a bit of random neural firing. She opened the front door and continued on her way.
It was dusk. The road before her was a motley of shifting blue shadows, its procession broken occasionally by the orange glow of street-lamps hovering above. The ground was shiny – wet – slathered in some sort of sweat or grease that had no origin. The wind shook the layers of palm-leaves around her. The meticulously-kept lawns of the cookie-cutter neighborhood lay silent, as if they were nothing more than decorations. It was dusk.
Ch-chink. The keys rustled in Emily's pocket, as if mocking her decision to walk to the library rather than drive. The street was relatively quiet, save for the last-minute cries of birds and steeping whine of crickets. Every so often, a car would roll past her on the neighborhood road, its headlights jeeringly bright in the dim blue of dusk. Ch-chink.
It was a haven. The library lay ahead, its softly-lit presence contrasting against the falling dark. It would afford her security with its plain walls, dry books, and stench of aging parchment. It would surely keep her safe from whatever churned about in her peripheral vision. It was a haven.
Emily entered, and headed toward the science books in back. She plucked a Feynman book off the shelves and began to read.
Swoosh. The sound of a passer-by made her reflexively glance around. With panic, she realized an odd attribute of her surroundings...
She was surrounded by lines.
Vertical spines, horizontal shelves, parallel aisles. The whole library was constructed from lines. The books that crammed the shelves were vertical stripes. The shelves were horizontal, straight planes. The aisles were parallel, rectangular solids. All lines. Peering through the gaps in the shelves, Emily only saw more lines of books; and through those gaps, still more – receding all the way into infinity.
The library was made of identical layers of spines, shelves, aisles – laid one upon the other, like pages in a book. Spines, shelves, aisles... leading to shelves, aisles, spines... leading to aisles, spines, shelves.
Dizzied by repetition, Emily abruptly sat down. The Feynman book fell from her hands. It bounced away from her, fluttering its pages.
And, horrifically – the sound echoed.
It reverberated across the bookshelves, oscillated between the vertical spines. It propagated through the entire library in identical auditory fragments. As the sound hit physical objects, it shattered into a million bits identical to itself, which shattered into more, and more...
It was clear. This was the world Emily was condemned to. A world of ever-repeating fragments, a world of self-similar patterns.
Emily had thought that the apparition resembled none of her world.
No; it resembled her entire world.
The apparition Emily saw that day could not be described. It was something – just something. She couldn't capture it with the English language.
The English language... that fastidiously constructed edifice that tries and succeeds to contain all the vastness of life in its steely walls... failed to contain this being.
Was it even a “being”? No. The thing even evaded the basic categories of “life” and “lifeless” that have existed since the beginning of time. To try and assign “living”, or “dead”, or “inanimate” to it was as if to try and assign gender to a rock. The thing was wholly incompatible with such notions. It was neither living, nor dead, nor inanimate – it just existed.
Exist, it did. It wasn't a figment of her imagination. It stood out crisply against the backdrop of wall, not muddled with its surroundings – determinedly present.
And it was horrifying. But not horrifying because it eluded language, not because it was different from everything of Emily's world. Horrifying because its exterior was pockmarked with a peculiar black-and-white pattern. A pattern that repeated like a Julia fractal. A Julia fractal that spiraled to infinity.
The thing was bone-white. Gaping, black holes filled its center, which broke into repeating fragments as if it were some phantasmal projection of a kaleidoscope. It was a mosaic of nearly identical bits and pieces – each piece distorted a bit differently than the next, folding in on itself in horrifically beautiful symmetry.
The gaping holes – with their disorienting, echoing repetition – could swallow up the sanity of any observer.
But there wasn't time to get lost in its pattern. In a second, the thing had vanished – and Emily was staring down the blankness of the wall.
She shook the image out of her head. It was surely just a trick of the eye, a bit of random neural firing. She opened the front door and continued on her way.
It was dusk. The road before her was a motley of shifting blue shadows, its procession broken occasionally by the orange glow of street-lamps hovering above. The ground was shiny – wet – slathered in some sort of sweat or grease that had no origin. The wind shook the layers of palm-leaves around her. The meticulously-kept lawns of the cookie-cutter neighborhood lay silent, as if they were nothing more than decorations. It was dusk.
Ch-chink. The keys rustled in Emily's pocket, as if mocking her decision to walk to the library rather than drive. The street was relatively quiet, save for the last-minute cries of birds and steeping whine of crickets. Every so often, a car would roll past her on the neighborhood road, its headlights jeeringly bright in the dim blue of dusk. Ch-chink.
It was a haven. The library lay ahead, its softly-lit presence contrasting against the falling dark. It would afford her security with its plain walls, dry books, and stench of aging parchment. It would surely keep her safe from whatever churned about in her peripheral vision. It was a haven.
Emily entered, and headed toward the science books in back. She plucked a Feynman book off the shelves and began to read.
Swoosh. The sound of a passer-by made her reflexively glance around. With panic, she realized an odd attribute of her surroundings...
She was surrounded by lines.
Vertical spines, horizontal shelves, parallel aisles. The whole library was constructed from lines. The books that crammed the shelves were vertical stripes. The shelves were horizontal, straight planes. The aisles were parallel, rectangular solids. All lines. Peering through the gaps in the shelves, Emily only saw more lines of books; and through those gaps, still more – receding all the way into infinity.
The library was made of identical layers of spines, shelves, aisles – laid one upon the other, like pages in a book. Spines, shelves, aisles... leading to shelves, aisles, spines... leading to aisles, spines, shelves.
Dizzied by repetition, Emily abruptly sat down. The Feynman book fell from her hands. It bounced away from her, fluttering its pages.
And, horrifically – the sound echoed.
It reverberated across the bookshelves, oscillated between the vertical spines. It propagated through the entire library in identical auditory fragments. As the sound hit physical objects, it shattered into a million bits identical to itself, which shattered into more, and more...
It was clear. This was the world Emily was condemned to. A world of ever-repeating fragments, a world of self-similar patterns.
Emily had thought that the apparition resembled none of her world.
No; it resembled her entire world.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Heaven and Hell
Imagine our world in black and white.
Not black, white, and gray. Only black and white. Every color, then, would have exactly two options for its appearance. There would be no middle ground, no halfway choice between the two diametrically opposed states of being to choose from.
That's what the afterlife is like.
There exist only two options for our eternity: Heaven and Hell. Each person who walks this earth has to fit in one category, or the other. There's no middle ground – no gray.
Are we really so fundamentally different from one another that some of us reach ultimate happiness and all others writhe in fire? Can one man really be destined for the everlasting peace of Heaven, while the man standing next to him is doomed to the tortures of Hell?
How is this designation determined? Does it really all teeter on the one question of whether or not a person believes in God? What if a murderer believes in God, or a life-saver doesn't? What carves that invisible, ineffaceable line through our society that separates those bound for Heaven and those bound for Hell?
Is our ultimate destination determined from birth? Does each of us come from the womb with an invisible dog-tag strapped to our ankle, designating our final home? Or are we born as a blank slate – a tabula rasa – with a pen poised upon it by God, Who scrawls every good and bad deed we commit in indelible ink?
Will we ever be able to answer these fundamental questions, that internally bombard us as we meander through life?
Of course. But only when life falls away... and we are confronted with either Heaven or Hell itself.
Not black, white, and gray. Only black and white. Every color, then, would have exactly two options for its appearance. There would be no middle ground, no halfway choice between the two diametrically opposed states of being to choose from.
That's what the afterlife is like.
There exist only two options for our eternity: Heaven and Hell. Each person who walks this earth has to fit in one category, or the other. There's no middle ground – no gray.
Are we really so fundamentally different from one another that some of us reach ultimate happiness and all others writhe in fire? Can one man really be destined for the everlasting peace of Heaven, while the man standing next to him is doomed to the tortures of Hell?
How is this designation determined? Does it really all teeter on the one question of whether or not a person believes in God? What if a murderer believes in God, or a life-saver doesn't? What carves that invisible, ineffaceable line through our society that separates those bound for Heaven and those bound for Hell?
Is our ultimate destination determined from birth? Does each of us come from the womb with an invisible dog-tag strapped to our ankle, designating our final home? Or are we born as a blank slate – a tabula rasa – with a pen poised upon it by God, Who scrawls every good and bad deed we commit in indelible ink?
Will we ever be able to answer these fundamental questions, that internally bombard us as we meander through life?
Of course. But only when life falls away... and we are confronted with either Heaven or Hell itself.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
A Cross-Section of my Childhood
My eyelashes brush up against the adjacent planks. My nose presses against splinters. I peer through the slats.
I'm lying face-down on the porch. The floor is raised two or three feet above the ground, creating a dark, enclosed chamber beneath it. Many an object has plummeted through the gaps and into the space below, due to my slippery fingers or inadequate grasp. Since the chamber is inaccessible from the outside, each object remains there forever – frozen in the orientation it fell in, like a person of Pompeii frozen in his dying stance.
I look down. From the mottled patches of light and dark, dirt and leaves below, I can make out plastic combs, grimy crayons, tiny figurines from long ago. The thickness of the layer of dust encasing each one indicates how long it has been trapped there, how long ago it was dropped.
I remember, as a child, what a horrifying phenomenon it was to drop something through the slats. If the object was important – a ring, a set of car keys, my brother's third grade science workbook – we construed hangers and strings to pickpocket the space below. Even though the chances of actually obtaining the object were as slim as the chances of winning an iPod in a claw machine, we still tried. If our hand-eye coordination was exceptionally terrible, we'd pull up the wrong object – a bubble wand instead of a wedding band, a ballpoint pen rather than a golden letter-opener. In that scenario, we'd curse good luck for using itself up on the wrong object, and continue to fish.
I glance from key-chain to fork, from gum wrapper to sticker sheet. The memories rush back. The cartooned face of Hercules stares up at me, from the mud-smeared and faded cover of an old coloring book. A small, plastic pig catches my eye, nestled between mounds of dirt and piles of grime. I smile; I still remember when my brother and I used to collect miniature farm animals from vending machines for a quarter. Greedily counting up our stock, we would then wield armies against each other and play out epic battles of horses and roosters and goats. When the best of warriors suddenly flew from the table and to their demise below, tears and mangled hangers followed.
What a world of memories. A glimpse through these slats is a glimpse into my childhood.
But it is a glimpse unique from any other. Sure, I could slide open, say, a drawer – and gaze at the objects inside, relive the memory attached with each. But those objects represented my childhood quite poorly. They were only the “really nice” objects that my parents had deemed worth keeping: perfectly-formed shells, birthday cards, nice jewelry. The drawers didn't hold the twenty-five cent figurines or grimy crayons that were part of my everyday childhood life. Only the space under the floor held that.
The chamber under the porch is an accurate cross-section of my childhood. The objects and memories there aren't picked or filtered; they're just the unglorified past.
And that's exactly what a memory should be.
I'm lying face-down on the porch. The floor is raised two or three feet above the ground, creating a dark, enclosed chamber beneath it. Many an object has plummeted through the gaps and into the space below, due to my slippery fingers or inadequate grasp. Since the chamber is inaccessible from the outside, each object remains there forever – frozen in the orientation it fell in, like a person of Pompeii frozen in his dying stance.
I look down. From the mottled patches of light and dark, dirt and leaves below, I can make out plastic combs, grimy crayons, tiny figurines from long ago. The thickness of the layer of dust encasing each one indicates how long it has been trapped there, how long ago it was dropped.
I remember, as a child, what a horrifying phenomenon it was to drop something through the slats. If the object was important – a ring, a set of car keys, my brother's third grade science workbook – we construed hangers and strings to pickpocket the space below. Even though the chances of actually obtaining the object were as slim as the chances of winning an iPod in a claw machine, we still tried. If our hand-eye coordination was exceptionally terrible, we'd pull up the wrong object – a bubble wand instead of a wedding band, a ballpoint pen rather than a golden letter-opener. In that scenario, we'd curse good luck for using itself up on the wrong object, and continue to fish.
I glance from key-chain to fork, from gum wrapper to sticker sheet. The memories rush back. The cartooned face of Hercules stares up at me, from the mud-smeared and faded cover of an old coloring book. A small, plastic pig catches my eye, nestled between mounds of dirt and piles of grime. I smile; I still remember when my brother and I used to collect miniature farm animals from vending machines for a quarter. Greedily counting up our stock, we would then wield armies against each other and play out epic battles of horses and roosters and goats. When the best of warriors suddenly flew from the table and to their demise below, tears and mangled hangers followed.
What a world of memories. A glimpse through these slats is a glimpse into my childhood.
But it is a glimpse unique from any other. Sure, I could slide open, say, a drawer – and gaze at the objects inside, relive the memory attached with each. But those objects represented my childhood quite poorly. They were only the “really nice” objects that my parents had deemed worth keeping: perfectly-formed shells, birthday cards, nice jewelry. The drawers didn't hold the twenty-five cent figurines or grimy crayons that were part of my everyday childhood life. Only the space under the floor held that.
The chamber under the porch is an accurate cross-section of my childhood. The objects and memories there aren't picked or filtered; they're just the unglorified past.
And that's exactly what a memory should be.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
"Sleep Talk"
“Betition maure ring aug gurr taimon.”
My brother talks in his sleep.
I never know what he's saying, though. I can never glean any meaning from his slurred consonants.
“Raung etra.”
His words are in some ethereal language that falls incoherent on the ears of waking souls.
“Meang aurg nurron egula.”
Maybe it's not his fault, though. Maybe it's mine. I need a little more imagination. I need to be able to connect the dots. I need to be able to infer the Mona Lisa from sparse segments of line, need to be able to sculpt Shakespeare out of garbled and disjointed phonemes. It's my responsibility to give the sleep-talk its meaning.
After all, our brains aren't fed a coherent reality. They're bombarded with a bunch of meaningless action potentials they have to interpret. The action potentials themselves – in their raw and uninterpreted state – are meaningless.
My brother's sleep-talk is like a bunch of raw action potentials, waiting to be interpreted by a brain.
But how can my brain interpret such at three or four am? By then my alertness is detrimentally impaired by the fuzzy haze of sleep. I can't possibly dole out meaning to “raung etra” when I can barely even remember where I am!
Enter: the tape recorder.
On the night of April 28th, I lay in bed, tape-recorder in hand. My finger poised at the record button, I was ready to pounce at his first garbled utterance.
Silence pervaded the spring night. It was hard to believe that such a serene, innocuous silence could ever be punctured by sound – but I knew it would happen sometime. The wait seemed so much longer than usual when my finger was frozen at the red button...
“Berrang mau...”
My heart jumped; I roughly punched at the record button with a plunge of fear.
The syllables echoed towards me. As always, their meaning was hopelessly diffused in the ever-collapsing reverberations of the hall.
But maybe – just maybe – I could give them some profundity in daytime.
* * *
The morning commenced. I spotted the recorder twirled and tangled in the folds of my bedsheet. I eagerly snatched it up; I pressed the rewind button.
Brrzzzhhhh... zzhhh... zhhh... - pop!
It was ready to be heard.
...Whatever it was.
I pushed play. The faint static of recorded silence faded in. Then came the articulated syllables of my brother, fluidly spilling out like a soliloquy in a native tongue.
But to me, it was a soliloquy of nonsense. As always.
I dejectedly turned off the recorder and set it aside. There was no hope; I just didn't have the ability to interpret the sleep-talk. I tried hopelessly to console myself – maybe nobody could interpret his words. Maybe waking souls simply didn't have the faculties to interpret sleep-talk. Maybe his soliloquy bubbled straight from the realm of dreams. Who was I, to think that I could understand it?
It obviously wasn't meant to be heard by the ears of the wakeful. And so I gave up.
* * *
A week or so later, after immersing myself in my own business and turning a deaf ear to the garbled sleep prattle of my brother, I came across a passage in my psychology book that re-ignited my interest. I tried to brusquely push the thought aside, but I of course failed.
My fascination with his case of somniloquy could not be repressed. A million questions sprang to mind. Did his sleep-talk occur during REM or NREM sleep? Was it related to a psychological disorder such as REM sleep behavior disorder, or did it stand alone? And, most of all... what did his sleep-talk mean?
Finally – my concentration broken, my curiosity whet – I left my books splayed on the desk and sought the tape recorder.
Play. ... “Mau niv urr treetah deece...”
Still garbled – as always. Frustrated, I stopped the tape recorder, rewound it, and played it again.
“Niv urr treetah deece ifarr muh...”
Rewind. Play.
“Niv urr treetah deece...”
Rewind, play.
“Niv urr treetah...”
Niv urr. I stopped, my hands frozen on the play button. The chunks of speech he was spewing resembled English words – but with the stresses all mixed up, the pauses all misplaced. If the listener used his or her faculties to correct for such errors... the meaning was evident.
Niv urr. It was a distorted rendition of never. Rewind, play.
“Niv urr treetah...” Never try to...
Rewind, play. “Deece ifarr muh...” Decipher my... Oh, no, no.
Never try to decipher my words. That's what he was saying.
The tape-recorder slipped from my fingers and fell to the floor; the recording sharply stopped at the impact.
* * *
An hour later, I re-entered the room, disgusted with myself for running away so cowardly, for heeding the warning of my brother. I picked the recorder off the floor and rewound the tape again, determined to finish the translation. I would not be dismayed by piddling superstitions or unsubstantiated fears this time.
Rewind. Play.
“Urrtree tahdeecif arr muh...”
Incoherent syllables met my ears yet again. The sleep-talk was utter nonsense. Meaningless babble.
My brother wasn't spewing cryptic admonishes, and he never had been. It had just been my imagination. I had given meaning to something that had none. The sleep-talk was total bunk.
... But that's all of life, isn't it? Reality is but a meaningless collection of shapes and shadows, only assuming identity when we give it such.
My brother talks in his sleep.
I never know what he's saying, though. I can never glean any meaning from his slurred consonants.
“Raung etra.”
His words are in some ethereal language that falls incoherent on the ears of waking souls.
“Meang aurg nurron egula.”
Maybe it's not his fault, though. Maybe it's mine. I need a little more imagination. I need to be able to connect the dots. I need to be able to infer the Mona Lisa from sparse segments of line, need to be able to sculpt Shakespeare out of garbled and disjointed phonemes. It's my responsibility to give the sleep-talk its meaning.
After all, our brains aren't fed a coherent reality. They're bombarded with a bunch of meaningless action potentials they have to interpret. The action potentials themselves – in their raw and uninterpreted state – are meaningless.
My brother's sleep-talk is like a bunch of raw action potentials, waiting to be interpreted by a brain.
But how can my brain interpret such at three or four am? By then my alertness is detrimentally impaired by the fuzzy haze of sleep. I can't possibly dole out meaning to “raung etra” when I can barely even remember where I am!
Enter: the tape recorder.
On the night of April 28th, I lay in bed, tape-recorder in hand. My finger poised at the record button, I was ready to pounce at his first garbled utterance.
Silence pervaded the spring night. It was hard to believe that such a serene, innocuous silence could ever be punctured by sound – but I knew it would happen sometime. The wait seemed so much longer than usual when my finger was frozen at the red button...
“Berrang mau...”
My heart jumped; I roughly punched at the record button with a plunge of fear.
The syllables echoed towards me. As always, their meaning was hopelessly diffused in the ever-collapsing reverberations of the hall.
But maybe – just maybe – I could give them some profundity in daytime.
* * *
The morning commenced. I spotted the recorder twirled and tangled in the folds of my bedsheet. I eagerly snatched it up; I pressed the rewind button.
Brrzzzhhhh... zzhhh... zhhh... - pop!
It was ready to be heard.
...Whatever it was.
I pushed play. The faint static of recorded silence faded in. Then came the articulated syllables of my brother, fluidly spilling out like a soliloquy in a native tongue.
But to me, it was a soliloquy of nonsense. As always.
I dejectedly turned off the recorder and set it aside. There was no hope; I just didn't have the ability to interpret the sleep-talk. I tried hopelessly to console myself – maybe nobody could interpret his words. Maybe waking souls simply didn't have the faculties to interpret sleep-talk. Maybe his soliloquy bubbled straight from the realm of dreams. Who was I, to think that I could understand it?
It obviously wasn't meant to be heard by the ears of the wakeful. And so I gave up.
* * *
A week or so later, after immersing myself in my own business and turning a deaf ear to the garbled sleep prattle of my brother, I came across a passage in my psychology book that re-ignited my interest. I tried to brusquely push the thought aside, but I of course failed.
My fascination with his case of somniloquy could not be repressed. A million questions sprang to mind. Did his sleep-talk occur during REM or NREM sleep? Was it related to a psychological disorder such as REM sleep behavior disorder, or did it stand alone? And, most of all... what did his sleep-talk mean?
Finally – my concentration broken, my curiosity whet – I left my books splayed on the desk and sought the tape recorder.
Play. ... “Mau niv urr treetah deece...”
Still garbled – as always. Frustrated, I stopped the tape recorder, rewound it, and played it again.
“Niv urr treetah deece ifarr muh...”
Rewind. Play.
“Niv urr treetah deece...”
Rewind, play.
“Niv urr treetah...”
Niv urr. I stopped, my hands frozen on the play button. The chunks of speech he was spewing resembled English words – but with the stresses all mixed up, the pauses all misplaced. If the listener used his or her faculties to correct for such errors... the meaning was evident.
Niv urr. It was a distorted rendition of never. Rewind, play.
“Niv urr treetah...” Never try to...
Rewind, play. “Deece ifarr muh...” Decipher my... Oh, no, no.
Never try to decipher my words. That's what he was saying.
The tape-recorder slipped from my fingers and fell to the floor; the recording sharply stopped at the impact.
* * *
An hour later, I re-entered the room, disgusted with myself for running away so cowardly, for heeding the warning of my brother. I picked the recorder off the floor and rewound the tape again, determined to finish the translation. I would not be dismayed by piddling superstitions or unsubstantiated fears this time.
Rewind. Play.
“Urrtree tahdeecif arr muh...”
Incoherent syllables met my ears yet again. The sleep-talk was utter nonsense. Meaningless babble.
My brother wasn't spewing cryptic admonishes, and he never had been. It had just been my imagination. I had given meaning to something that had none. The sleep-talk was total bunk.
... But that's all of life, isn't it? Reality is but a meaningless collection of shapes and shadows, only assuming identity when we give it such.
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